Know the smell of agarbatti? At the NGV Triennial, one artist’s incense comes without it

The incense sticks in Megha Joshi’s work for the NGV Triennial have no coating, and so no smell. Bound together in long lengths, they make sweeping lines across the gallery, “operating almost like a 3D drawing”, the NGV says. In the same show, the textile designer Chinar Farooqui will make a contemporary version of a Mughal tent to celebrate chikankari, the white-on-white embroidery of Lucknow.

The fourth NGV Triennial runs at NGV International, 180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, from 13 December 2026 to 11 April 2027. The gallery is open daily from 10am to 5pm, except on Christmas Day. Entry is free. Of the nearly 100 artists and collectives from 35 countries taking part, six are listed as Indian on the exhibition’s page, and the NGV’s media release of 15 April 2026 describes the works of four: Joshi, Farooqui, the architect and designer Rooshad Shroff and the artist Shilpa Gupta.

White thread on white cloth

According to the NGV, chikankari emerged in Lucknow during the Mughal period and is worked across sheer muslin; in the release’s words, it is “an art form historically sustained by women, stitched into the rhythms of everyday life in Uttar Pradesh”. Farooqui’s tent will reinterpret the kind once used as temporary royal encampments.

Farooqui founded Injiri, a Jaipur-based label, in 2009. By the label’s account, she grew up in Rajasthan, took a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University, did postgraduate study in textile design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and made work trips to craft clusters including Lucknow, Chanderi and Kachchh. Injiri makes clothing for women and textiles for the home and works closely with master weavers. In 2015, Farooqui won the bedroom category of Elle Decor India’s EDIDA awards.

India’s Geographical Indications Registry lists Lucknow Chikan Craft as a registered handicraft of Uttar Pradesh, under a certificate dated 2 December 2008. New Delhi’s National Crafts Museum & Hastkala Academy blames mill-made fabrics, cotton polyester mixtures and thin silk for a disastrous decline in the quality of chikan work.

Incense at the NGV Triennial that smells of nothing

The release says this piece extends Joshi’s work with agarbatti, sticks found in many Indian homes and often made by women, and that their missing smell raises the question of “whether an incense stick without its smell is still embedded with meaning”.

Joshi’s studio site says she was born in 1973 and trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University Baroda. She then spent 10 years as a set designer and art director for film and television before returning to fine art in 2008. Her materials have included steel, fabric, bronze and rubber, along with everyday objects and materials used in Hindu ritual. Gender, ritual and religion take up a large part of her practice, the site says. She is based in Delhi NCR.

Agarbatti is also an industry. Announcing the Khadi Agarbatti Aatmanirbhar Mission on 2 August 2020, India’s Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises put the country’s daily consumption at about 1,490 tonnes and its daily production at just 760 tonnes. It gave the then-current job-work rate as ₹15 a kilogram and calculated that four artisans sharing an automatic machine would each earn at least ₹300 a day.

Light bulbs in carved marble

Shroff’s commission responds to the NGV’s Decorative Arts Collection in three related works. A pair of his embroidered C-chairs has been remade with thread in new colours drawn from Indian vernacular palettes. An embroidered bench, woven and enriched with intricately beaded embroidery, brings a different kind of tactility, the NGV says. And 12 marble lamps, carved by hand and made to hang, reinterpret the light bulb in stone.

His studio, a Mumbai-based boutique firm founded in 2011, covers architecture, interiors and bespoke furniture, and works with marble carvers from Jaipur, woodworkers from New Delhi and embroiderers from Mumbai and Lucknow. Its awards include an EDIDA for lighting in 2015, for its Marble Bulbs, and EDIDA Designer of the Year in 2017.

A departures board with letters missing

In Gupta’s Words come from ears, a flap board of the kind usually used for train departures presents fragments of words and phrases. The messages are “programmed to include mistakes, typos and missing letters”, and you are left to fill in the gaps. As the panels flip in rhythm, they make a soundscape the NGV calls compelling.

Her Mumbai gallery, Chemould Prescott Road, says Gupta was born in the city in 1976, lives and works there and studied sculpture at the Sir J. J. School of Fine Arts from 1992 to 1997. It records her in the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 and in the first NGV Triennial, in 2017, and lists the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Queensland Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria among the collections holding her work.

What the NGV has not said yet

The gallery has not yet said what the other two Indian makers will show, or where any of these works will be placed. Dayanita Singh, born in 1961, has “defied easy categorisation as a photographer” for more than 40 years, in the NGV’s words, editing an archive of images into structures and spaces. She is known for what it calls book-objects and photo architecture, and her work is held by Tate and the Centre Pompidou, among others. The artist T. Venkanna, born in 1980 and based in Hyderabad, works across painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, embroidery and performance. He studied at MS University in Baroda, as Farooqui and Joshi did, and at JNTU in Hyderabad, and has shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

Chikankari has a long history in the everyday life of Uttar Pradesh, and agarbatti is found in many Indian homes. For just under four months on St Kilda Road, one is celebrated with a new take on a Mughal tent and the other goes without its smell. Seeing both costs nothing.